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Happy Halloween

My family has a couple of Halloween traditions, if you want to call them that: We eat chili and listen to King Crimson’s Islands. No, I don’t know why. I mean, the chili sort of makes sense, but Islands? Sure, it gets a little spooky about halfway through “Formentera Lady,” but it’s not the most frightening album in my library.

No, if you want to listen to some truly terrifying music, you’ve got to dust off some Ligeti or Suk. Or better yet, really freak out the neighbor kids with some Penderecki. Anything from Utrenja or Polymorphia will do, but his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima takes it to a whole ‘nother level. And while that’s playing in the background, see if you can make it through Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” without screaming like a little girl.

Sweet dreams.

Radical Inspiration 

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Dan Friedman was an extraordinary designer. His work is currently on display at the American Institute of Graphic Arts National Design Center in New York City through January 9, 2015. Dan Friedman: Radical Modernist explores his range of skills as an educator, designer, artist, and writer.

Friedman worked comfortably between these disciplines—from teaching (Yale and Cooper Union) to straight-up corporate design (one-time partner at Pentagram) to his experimental work in the East Village art scene (with the likes of Basquiat, Haring, and Koons).

Before he died in 1995, Friedman offered up a 12-point “radical modernist” agenda, among which are (1) engage in self-restraint; accept the challenge of working with reduced expectations and diminished resources, (2) bridge the boundaries that separate us from other creative professions and unexpected possibilities, and (3) be radical.

Voices from Ground Zero

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The 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City is easily the most powerful exhibit experience I’ve ever seen. Even the $24 admission fee and long lines are easily forgotten once you enter the museum. The site planning, architecture, and exhibit design is brilliant. Largely underground (four stories deep), the 110,000-sq.-ft. exhibition space elegantly tells the before, during, and after stories of the September 11, 2001 attacks. If you only see one thing while visiting the Big Apple, this should be it.

An Original Mad Man

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One of the great things about visiting NYC is that you never run out of things to see. The Museum of the City of New York is running an exhibit through January 19, 2015 titled Mac Conner: A New York Life. Conner’s illustrations from the late 1940s to the ’60s promoted the likes of Bell Telephone, Ford, United Air Lines, and Hi Ho Crackers. His work graced the pages of RedbookMcCallsCollier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. Now 100 years old, Conner’s beautiful acrylic paintings are just as remarkable today as they were back when commercial artists favored illustrations over photography. It’s great to see his talents on display.

A Life in Design

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So what do Mobile, Xerox, PBS, Chase Manhattan Bank, and National Geographic all have in common? Their graphic identity programs were designed by New York-based designer Tom Geismar. Along with long-time partner Ivan Chermayeff, the firm now known as Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv has been producing groundbreaking graphic design since the late 1950s. The School of Visual Arts recently honored Geismar with the 26th annual Master Series Award and Exhibition. On a recent trip to New York City, my wife Linda and I enjoyed viewing the work of this legendary designer.

Where the Sun Don’t Shine

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I’ve been on the road shooting for Hecla Mining Company—a client we’ve worked with since 1988. The shoot involved both still photography and film footage taken above and below ground level. Our intrepid shoot team (l to r: Cary Seward and Jim Swoboda from ILF Media, and photographer Jim Van Gundy) is shown at the 5,500-foot level at Hecla’s Lucky Friday silver mine. That’s right: more than a mile underground. We eventually went even lower, to a depth of 6,250 feet. Most people think it’s chilly down there, but it’s actually quite warm, with temperatures hitting the high 80s.

There Goes the Warranty

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About 6,000 below the surface at the Lucky Friday mine, Jim Swoboda of ILF Media (on the left ) and Jim Van Gundy set up a photo shoot for Hecla Mining Company. This brand-new bolter drills holes in the rock wall so that a series of bolts and plates can secure steel wire mesh that, in turn, helps prevent rock from breaking away and falling. So how’d this big piece of equipment get more than a mile below the surface? It was cut up into smaller, more manageable pieces to fit inside the skip (elevator), then reassembled underground. When it comes to logistics, UPS has nothing on Hecla.

Hanging Cranes

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When we moved into our new office building earlier this year, we gave over a portion of the lobby space to a very talented individual: Patti Reiko Osebold. An origami artist from Spokane—and a dear friend—Patti graciously created 31 red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis) for an installation entitled Flight of the Grus japonensis on Pacific. Throughout east Asia, the cranes are a symbol of longevity, good fortune, and love.

Thanks to Chad Ramsey for his beautiful portrait of the artist.

“Danger” Is His Middle Name

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On a recent trip to Hecla Mining Company’s Lucky Friday mine in Mullan, Idaho, photographer Jim Van Gundy takes a breather before heading underground. We’ve teamed up with Jim, a Spokane-based shooter, on several Hecla projects over the last 25 years. He’s one of the most experienced mining photographers in North America: a hard-working professional who knows his way around gritty environments—and who will go to any length to capture beautiful images. And, as you can see, a guy who thrives on a little danger.

French Flyers

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On a recent trip to Casa Barardi – Hecla Mining Company’s gold property in western Quebec, we enlisted the help of Montreal-based aerial copter company VuDuCiel. We had them flying a six-blade drone copter with a DSLR camera mount outdoors; they used a smaller copter for indoor shooting. Standing in front of Casa’s headframe is operator Jean-Francois Vermette (left) and his camera operator and sidekick Julien Gramigna. They spoke pretty good English and were a pleasure to work with. When asked to perform some death-defying maneuvers, they always responded with an enthusiastic “Oui oui!” Merci, gentlemen.

How Do You Say “Latrine” in French?

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It’s dark, hot, musty, and noisy. Other than that, working at an underground mine site is a piece of cake.

We recently spent a week traveling to Hecla Mining Company’s gold property, Casa Berardi, to shoot both photos and film footage. Located in Quebec roughly 500 miles northwest of Montreal, Casa sits in a remote area where cell service doesn’t exist and English is mixed in with a lot of French. Above, photographer Jim Van Gundy (left) watches Jim Swoboda of ILF Media prep a shot.

Oh, I almost forgot: Don’t load up on the coffee in the morning, because you won’t find any port-a-potties underground either.

Quick Recommendation

I prefer not to categorize books. Like music, they’re either good or bad, and discussions about genres and sub-genres tend to illuminate the critic rather than the author.

However… 

I think that, within the “good” camp, it’s somewhat helpful to separate the page-turners (pretty much anything Stephen King writes) from the profound—like, say, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. It’s not that King can’t write beautifully when he wants to. To cite just one example, there are several passages in “The Body,” a novella included in the book Different Seasons, that gave me pause. But let’s not kid ourselves: Robinson occupies an entirely different plane of existence.

There’s a point to all this, I promise.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, and, well…it’s remarkable. It might be the first book I’ve ever read that somehow strikes an appropriate balance between compelling, hard-to-put-down story and meaningful disquisition on the utter strangeness of our existence…

“Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people’s lives be so convoluted?”

…and on the anguish of love.

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”

I’ll be thinking about Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki for a very long time.

Fear not! We know grammar!

Experts in West Africa are predicting as many as 1.4 million new cases of Ebola by January. The CDC is “doubling down” on outreach and training. Siddhartha Mukherjee warns that “even if every system in place to identify suspected carriers had been working perfectly, [Thomas Eric Duncan] may have still set off a mini-epidemic in Dallas.”

Don’t worry, though: the Washington Post is on it, answering the questions everyone else is afraid to ask.

Musical Interlude

I was in Seattle Monday and Tuesday, in town to see the final show of the King Crimson Elements tour. Tickets went on sale June 6 at 10 a.m.; by 10:03 I’d purchased two—one for me, the other for my 17-year-old son. The four-month wait was almost unbearable, but for two glorious hours, from “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One” to a blistering encore of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” well…all was right with the world.

Tony Levin took some photographs after the show. Think you can spot me in the crowd? Tell you what: I’ll send you a bag of official helveticka blend coffee if you’re successful.

Let me show you some letterheads

Letterheads, we make them all the time here at helveticka. However, I think if you asked a random 20-something (i.e. one of my peers) they would have no idea what one was. But for those in the know there is a rather rabid underground culture celebrating and sharing the classic (and sometimes no so classic) letterheads of the past. The hub for all things letterhead is a tumblr blog called Letterheady.

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Letterheady showcases mainly famous persons or organizations, with the occasional President thrown in for good measure. They pluck letterheads from just about every corner of the entertainment, art, design, and business world. Not to mention a rather impressive swath of time, ranging from the late 1800s all the way to the present.

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Take a look at their blog, there are some really great ones to check out. Below are a few more of my favorites.

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Well, I do think this letterhead from Richard Simmons, circa 2009, has to be to be the all time greatest though!

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